This article presents the experiences of three women who have chosen to move from secular, assimilated lives to lives characterized by the distinctive dress and practice associated with observant Islam, Orthodox Judaism, and Orthodox Christianity, respectively. All three relied upon informal, peer, and distance learning strategies for their…

This mother-daughter case study focuses on a key feature of discourse within a Mexican immigrant family that links oral traditions to resilience and motivation. I combine observations from a previous ethnographic study with recent follow-up interviews of a Mexican immigrant student building on a funds of knowledge framework and an ecological…

Drawing on ethnographic data on two Chinese immigrant families over a five-year period, I illustrate how and why growing alienation occurred in these families. My analysis shows that a host of developmental, immigration-related, and cultural factors lead to growing alienation in parent-child relations. Social class also plays an important role in…

This ethnographic study expands educational anthropologists' knowledge of the relationship between higher education and personal and social change in so-called traditional societies. It describes transitions in the status of Druze women in Israel brought about by the first women from the community to obtain higher education, granting new insights…

These comments, by a Singaporean and an American, focus on four themes: roles of anthropologists; the pedagogy of culture; challenges in combining Indigenous and mainstream epistemologies; and reciprocal influences between social and political contexts, and struggles for Indigenous education and self-determination.

This article describes how a group of black women read culture, class, and other social relations, analyzing the process and skill of reading linguistic and paralinguistic cues in allowing individuals to navigate across multiple discourses. I draw from one ethnographic study of talk in a Midwestern hair salon. Such research seeks to strengthen…

Examined how the experiences of a Mexican immigrant para-educator translated into beliefs and teaching, using the "funds of knowledge" concept to consider her experiences as critical to teaching. Results indicated that she had markedly different experiences from mainstream educators, yet numerous factors worked against using them for instruction.…

Describes a Chinese Canadian immigrant family that is encountering difficulties with schooling, demonstrating the complex interrelationship between home literacy, culture, and politics of schooling. Findings suggest that cultural mismatch theory alone cannot explain minority school failure. Rather, multilevel interactions, including cultural…

Compared the child-rearing practices and values of low-income Mexican immigrants raising their children in the United States with those of their siblings raising children in Mexico, discussing family accommodation within the ecocultural niche, variation in ecocultural contexts, effects of immigration, cultural change of different types, and…

Examined how immigrants from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) assimilated into Israeli society and schools. Data from observations, interviews, and surveys indicated that educational policies and school arrangements, and CIS immigrants' high self-esteem, produced a semipermeable enclave. CIS students acquired the Hebrew language and…

Explores the sociocultural dynamics within an urban fifth-grade science classroom, highlighting attempts to emulate the ideals of the collective culture of science within the classroom and how students reframed those practices. Discusses the importance of thinking about students' approach to and deviations from scientific practice norms in terms…

Explores how Java, Indonesia's classical Islamic community, negotiates modernization and globalization through the interface of an Islamic boarding school and higher education. The negotiation requires imagining and reinventing modernity and tradition. Examines how one boarding school's leadership engages these processes in its curricular goals…

Reviews four books that contextually examine definitions of childhood and adolescence: "Peer Power: Preadolescent Culture and Identity" (Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler); "Angels' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday" (Ralph Cintron); "Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers" (Niobe Way); and "At Home in…

Research relationships are not private but are part of the public realm. Research relationships are reconceptualized as research space in which the two participants interact like two borders intersecting. Via a review of classic research literature these classic relationships are explored. (MMU)

Students in two desegregated urban high schools agreed on the definition of a good student but disagreed on the acceptability of the model for blacks. Six black high achievers, within these contrasting environments (middle-class versus working-class) show how they respond to the conflict of being black and a model student. (MMU)